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Update:4122 - The Christmas Update is Live!
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! Today we released the Christmas update (build 4122) which features some fun little touches, new editor tools, and several optimizations! Build 4122 - Dec. 23rd *'New Features' **Updated main menu and loading screns to match the festive Christmas spirit! **Your car has been gifted reindeer horns and a bright red nose (can be disabled in Options > General) **Added speed particles to cockpit view **MIDI files can now be attached to all songs with 4x BPM requirement **Priority of "Player Finished" trick text was adjusted to so it'll appear in front of other, less important messages **Updated the Game Lobby to better handle author names and how "Playlist" is displayed *'VR' **VR is now enabled in the default branch, and the experimental-VR branch has been removed **Smoothed camera movement in cockpit view **Smoothed out head rotation spring in cockpit mode **Motion blur is disabled in VR since it doesn't work **Reduced max turn speed in VR since fast turning was jarring *'Level Editor' **Added the StormNoise skybox **Added WorldText object to the level editor **Added the "Box" volume type to biodomes **Now if you hold down Shift, Control, or Alt when clicking on a Library Object to add to a level in the Level Editor it will rotate towards the cursor's rotation **Changed the biodome's directional light rotation to be based on Longitude and Latitude properties **Biodome volumes are now based on object scale, so they can have rotation and non-uniform scale **Sunshafts/godrays are now emitted from the directional light's direction, not position **Directional lights are now removed from the game. As a replacement, Level settings has properties for a global directional light **The ability to set light types has been removed **A Spotlight prefab has been added **An option has been added to biodomes to make the FogTop and FogBottom values relative to the Biodome **Added support for editing more types while multiple objects are selected. **Addable components that can't currently be added will be colored red in the dropdown **Added Empire Tower with new collision mesh **Added Virus blocker revamp **When saving a level in the level editor it will automatically go through all of the objects in the level and delete any duplicates (objects that are in the same position with the same rotation and scale) *'Optimizations' **Your machine's best graphics API is now selected by default, which is now DirectX 11 for many Windows PCs (may improve performance for some) **Disabled lighting on glass (improves performance for glass roads) **Optimized how Phantom sound components are managed **Lights can now be 0 for brightness, which disables them **Added mesh combining system which attempts to combine similar meshes into one object if they are both static *'Bug Fixes' **Fixed bug where some objects would have a flickering outline on them, caused by fog (DX9) **Made it so the ScaleTool won't allow scaling down to 0 anymore fixing potential bugs **Fixed bug where motion blur made bloom dimmer **Fixed bug with directional lights shutting off on restart in older levels **Fixed bug where the text in the Game Lobby level field would pop up and down when a long name was in the field **Fixed bug where player outlines in multiplayer were dim **Fixed shader so ancient Battery Building doesn't have draw order issues **Fixed car reflection bug on restart in Linux and OS X See more images of the Distance reindeer car in action here: http://imgur.com/a/sZSRa REMINDER: DISTANCE ADVENT CALENDAR This year's community-run Distance Advent calendar is quickly coming to a close! We highly recommend playing through the unbelivably amazing levels submitted so far. The final few levels will be released leading up to Christmas Day. Keep up the fantastic work creators! http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=581860592 NEXT UP We had some lofty plans for this update which didn't quite make in time, but fortunately a lot of the hard work for these systems is out of the way. I've been attempting to upgrade our Steam backend which allows us to finally implement stuff like proper Steam Controller and Steam Cloud support. I hope to ship upgraded Steam support early next year. Jason also made some great progress on the replay system but it also wasn't quite ready. We hope to finalize some of the replay interface next year and get out a version as soon as possible for feedback. We also recently streamed a bit of our updated Adventure mode running on PS4. If you'd like a taste of the new content (or just want to see the game run on PS4) I've decided to share Icebound's re-host of the stream. It only shows a few upgraded levels from the start of Adventure mode, but it should give a feel for what we've been developing. Obviously this video is a SPOILER if you're wanting to remain pure before the final version is released. POTENTIAL ADVENTURE MODE SPOILERS! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! Keep being awesome and we'll see you next year! - Jordan (@torcht for more frequent dev updates)